When I was 20, I flew off to The Big Apple, and when I emerged from
Penn Station into the swarm of yellow cabs, I asked my cabby to take me to
Greenwich Village. Here I am pushing 60 surfing cyberspace, and when I emerge
from the Server's home page and tool around on a search engine, I ask to be
dropped downtown at Poetry Café. I am immediately struck by the
colorful names: worm, mexlady, magdelena, "Jo Violent," glitter, rads,
fairygirl, sicseed, unknown, jabberwocky, missing, Dreamy, AFROdite, zin.
I am informed I need to choose a nickname, and as I have a copy of The Theater
and Its Double at hand, I choose the name, Artaud. We have to live with our choices.
So, here I am, a man suicided by the computer.
I feel like stout Balboa standing at the shoreline of the Pacific.
I feel like Walt Whitman being instructed by Emerson to write the
Great American Poem and coming back with a "list." In short, I feel not a little
awed by the openness and immediacy of the poetry chat room, a mutation of a reading,
a coffee clutch, a workshop, a cross-cultural bus
terminal, a push and pull, mind-bending wormhole into a new poetry.
As I told glitterclot (aka starache): I am rejecting the notion that the
subject matter is in the depth, the symbols, the metaphors of our poems,
here the content and style is the quickening situation, the
accident of our events in the room, the surface of the screen and the poem arising, a
kind of "candid camera" of our crosschatting, our poems, our whispers, our
moofies.
Thank you, my loves...I wish there was an emoticon for laurels, as I would present them to you all.
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